How a 4chan wannabe galvanised Spain's far-right election upstarts

Far-right party Vox supporters wave Spanish flags during campaign rally in Seville on April 24

CRISTINA QUICLER/AFP/Getty Images

Activist Mar Gonzalez wrestles with the black witch’s hat she’s wearing, holding the rim in place as wind rushes through the square opposite Malaga’s Cathedral. She’s worried, that’s why she has come here to protest alongside a group of nine other local feminists. “In Spain, fascist ideas against women are becoming more important,” says Gonzalez, who is also a candidate for the local left-wing party, Málaga Ahora. “I’m afraid we will turn back to the politics of Franco’s dictatorship.”

Taking place just days before the country’s general election on Sunday, the protest is designed to warn Malaga’s residents of the threats posed by Spain’s newly emerging far-right party. Buoyed by online support, Vox is ferociously anti-feminist, with representatives who are fond of the term “feminazis”. The party also threatens the theory that Spain’s recent memory of authoritarian rule immunised the country against the spread of European populism.

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Set against the backdrop of the Cathedral’s pink and beige stone, the group of witches hold hands, encircling a makeshift cauldron. Whoever has the red and white megaphone reads aloud comments about women made by various Spanish politicians before symbolically tossing the paper into the (unlit) fire.

This is just a sample of the anger felt by Spanish women since an 18-year-old accused five men of gang-rape at 2016’s bull-running festival in Pamplona. When the men – who called themselves “the wolf pack” or la manada – were convicted of “sexual abuse” instead of the more serious “rape” charge, cities across the country were convulsed by protests that lasted for days.

During this time, users of the world’s largest Spanish-speaking online forum, ForoCoches, gained notoriety for their misogyny, jumping to the defence of the five accused men. One of the defendants even thanked members publicly for their support – for “not following the herd”.

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“ForoCoches and other spaces [that are] nests of the Spanish manosphere, have reacted as expected to the feminist debate: with anger and fear of being dispossessed of their power status,” said the duo behind feminist collective Proyecto Una, who asked for their names not be published.

The Barcelona-based activists, who released “Leia, Rihanna and Trump”, a book about feminism and Spanish social media this month, say that ForoCoches has become notorious for doxxing – publishing the personal information of “those who dare to speak up against sexual violence”,

Feminist activist Alicia Murillo received threatening calls after her phone number was published in ForoCoches. Forum members also coordinated a campaign to identify the victim in the wolf pack trial. They compiled snippets of information published in the media, using these as clues to help them trawl through internet records. It took them just hours to reveal her identity. When they did, they smeared her details, including her home address, across the internet and used her picture to create memes.

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ForoCoches – which translates literally to “car forum” – was launched in 2003 by Alex Marín after the entrepreneur discovered there was no online space where he could discuss his latest purchase – a Renault Laguna. But as men gathered on the platform (researchers estimate there are several million users), the discussion evolved beyond cars. In the UK, the forum is perhaps most famous for a failed attempt to name the British research ship RRS Sir David Attenborough – also known as the original Boaty McBoatface – after the Spanish admiral Blas de Lezo, who sunk dozens of British ships in the 18th-century battle of Cartagena de Indias.

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Marín says he has no ideology “in politics or football.” Although his forum has become notorious for political toxicity, its users cannot be defined by one point of view (nor, for that matter, can Reddit or 4chan users). Dr Manuel Arias-Maldonado, political scientist at The University of Malaga, compares ForoCoches to a Spanish bar: "a space where men gather and talk freely about their concerns...without any inhibition".

He believes the forum’s privacy settings encourage its members to speak more openly. Like WhatsApp, new users must be invited by another member to join certain threads. That entry barrier makes members feel freer to speak out against the liberal, democratic consensus on issues such as feminism, says Arias-Maldonado. “What ForoCoches, and Whatsapp, provide is a place where you can use sarcasm and irony against these dominant values, you can be politically incorrect,” he adds.

Echoing the complicated relationship between 4chan and Trump, recently ForoCoches’ politically incorrect elements have found an ally in the far-right upstart Vox. The party shocked women in Spain’s south when they won 11 per cent of December’s regional vote after campaigning against “feminazis” and the country’s gender violence bill. Now, polls predict Vox will replicate that success on a national level on Sunday – a significant result in a country where memories of Franco’s dictatorship are less than 50 years old.

It was in the aftermath of the wolf pack trial that Vox and ForoCoches developed an informal alliance – both the party and the website viciously oppose women’s rights, reject the country’s gender violence law, use language that compares feminists to fascists, and distortedly portray feminism as an attack on men.

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Vox is not the only European party adopting internet rhetoric on feminism. When Matteo Salvini – Italy’s far-right deputy Prime Minister – shared an image of a woman at an anti-racism protest alongside a sarcastic comment, he echoed the way social media users attempt to punish women for speaking out on politics. The post (which has now been taken down) also egged on his followers, and the woman received a deluge of violent, sexist messages, causing her to report about 300 people to the police.

Ukip, too, is trying to appeal to online networks of fringe voters by announcing its selection of anti-feminist YouTuber Carl Benjamin as a MEP candidate for next month’s European election. By attaching itself to Benjamin – aka Sargon of Akkad – the party will be hoping to appeal to his nearly one million subscribers, including the hundreds of thousands of people who watched the 13 videos in his “Why Do People Hate #Feminism” YouTube playlist.

While western Europe’s populists are growing more comfortable engaging with anti-feminist rhetoric online, Spain’s Vox does this most explicitly, reflecting the jeering, often violent tone of online takedowns. In Andalusia, the party's regional president tweeted about a woman who was too unattractive to be gang-raped, while other party members bemoaning “supremacist feminism” and “gender jihadism".

But Forocoches members apparently enjoy hearing their language in national politics. In January 2019, a poll on the site found that 65 per cent of the forum’s users said they would vote for Vox.

When Marina Alías Sánchez, a journalist with the news website Vozpópuli, was reporting on ForoCoches, she used veteran user accounts to infiltrate the forum. “I could see that most of the political discussions were about Vox,” she says, speaking from Madrid. “The party has the support of many 'forococheros'. Many users questioned whether Vox was paying other users to support them, but sources close to Vox told me that it was not true,” she says.

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Despite the lack of evidence, Vox and ForoCoches’ common ground continues to fuel rumours that the party can influence the platform via fake accounts – particularly after London’s Institute of Strategic Dialogue identified a network of suspected fake Twitter users that had tweeted 4.4 million messages in support of Vox over the past year.

Back in Malaga, Gonzalez voices these suspicions. “I think ForoCoches is a tool of Vox,” she says. “Over the last year, the party has been learning a lot about social media. I think they have learnt to use ForoCoches for their own gains.”

Frederic Guerrero-Solé, who researches Vox’s social media strategy at Barcelona’s UPF University, says Vox has probably learnt to observe trends in the forum, such as where users’ politics diverge from Spain’s existing far-right parties – and then fill that gap. “Probably they look at these voters in ForoCoches, thinking it is a really large community that could be exploited politically.”

Whether the forum can be - or already has been - exploited is yet to be determined but the Proyecto Una activists warn between confusing exploitation and influence. “There are a lot of their supporters [in ForoCoches], sure, but Vox doesn’t have any control over them,” they said, speaking over Twitter.

That doesn’t mean Vox isn’t trying. In an interview with El Mundo, one of Spain’s largest newspapers, the party’s communications director said that 12 of their 120 social media volunteers are dedicated to ForoCoches, although he did not expand exactly on how they campaign on the site. Vox did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

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An article on another Spanish news site, CTXT, traces the beginning of Vox and ForoCoches “mutual fascination” back to 2017, when Vox leader Santiago Abascal hosted an Ask Me Anything- style question and answer session. Even back then, ForoCoches’ users were aware of Vox’s distinct appeal to the platform’s users. One posted a picture of tumbleweed, labelled: “picture of your voters outside of FC”.

Informal polls conducted on a platform with a reputation for irony are not exactly trustworthy. But Javier de Rivera, a researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, says that while ForoCoches might not be reflective of Spain as a whole, it does reflect a portion of angry voters on the country’s fringe.

The spike in popularity on ForoCoches mirrors the increase in popularity among the wider Spanish public – with polls suggesting the party could take 30 of the 350 seats in the national parliament after Sunday’s election. But the forum has not always been loyal to Vox – or even to the far-right. Five years ago, 60 per cent of ForoCoches users signalled their support for Podemos – the new left-wing party that was rising ahead of the 2014 European elections.

“2014 was a huge year for Podemos. They became the solution for everything because they were so new,” says Javier de Rivera, a member of the University’s Cibersomosaguas research group. “These people [on ForoCoches] are angry with the establishment. In 2014, Podemos were the only ones challenging the establishment but now they are a more traditional left party. Today, Vox offers them something new. For many people who are angry with the establishment, what matters is what is new.”